MSI today announced its K9A2 Platinum Motherboard based on AMD’s RD790 chipset, officially dubbed the 790FX. The 790FX serves as AMD’s primary single and dual-processor platform and replaces AMD’s antiquated 580X chipset. The new MSI board comes with support for a host of new features, including support for AMD quad-core processors and Crossfire X.

The K9A2 Platinum supports all AM2+ processors, which means it will work with AMD’s upcoming Phenom quad-core, tri-core and dual-core desktop processors. Existing AM2 processors are also supported by the newest board BIOS.

The 790FX also brings 41 PCIe 2.0 lanes to AMD’s AM2+ platform, allowing manufacturers flexibility in the number of PCIe slots integrated on the board. The K9A2 comes with four PCIe 2.0 x16 slots and supports AMD’s Triple-Play Technology. In addition, MSI goes a step further by offering Quad Crossfire capability on the mainboard.

AMD is not going to release a chipset for Intel chips... Especially not with their latest and greatest features. That would be dumb.

"Here you go Intel. I know that I am trying to regain market share that I lost to your Core chips, but why don't I just make a sweet Quad Crossfire platform for you so your Core customers have another great platform yo choose from. It's ok, I don't mind the lost chip sales..."

It's a trade off, really. People are more liable to upgrade their graphics cards at a faster rate than their CPUs. since Intel chip sets are still the dominant force on the market enabling crossfire on them helps AMD's graphics section(ATI) move more cards.

Yeah, but, and correct me if I am wrong, they make their gaphics cards drivers available for Intel chipsets running Intel procs.

But they are not going to make a board that runs their own chipset (AMD) that also runs an Intel proc just to increase GPU sales. Well, they might, but they definitely would not make available all the bells and whistles. Then they'd just be cutting their own throat.

I know that AMD has really managed to screw up the PR for their products the last few years, but I also just have to believe that someone, somewhere in that company, and likewise at NVidia, has sat down and crunched the numbers to figure out if they would make a net gain by licensing SLI/XFire to an intermediate competitor for use on that competitor’s chipsets.

EX: If we (Nvidia) license SLI to Intel for use on Intel’s chipsets, will what we make in increased GPU sales make up for what we lose in chipset sales?

One other thought: Stand by. Things are going to get ridiculously interesting if/when Intel gets into discrete graphics and starts throwing money at problems that NVidia/AMD are too cash-poor to solve.